Lima’s Catacombs · Bones Arranged in Patterns

Beneath the Monastery of San Francisco in Lima is a whole complex of catacombs, said to have held twenty-five thousand people. The bones were sorted by shape and stacked into rings and neat tiers: femurs set out in circles, skulls piled into towers.

It once called itself the city’s earliest cemetery, and people in Lima were in the habit of bringing their dead here. The shafts of the crypt served a second purpose in earthquakes — one side is a channel that disperses sound, the other stores water.

A circuit today takes about twenty minutes, and no light other than the fixed lighting is allowed. The exit is narrow; you have to stoop to get out.

Occult Chronicles / Lima · Peru / 1546